


Passing the slipped stitch over

by tarhiel



Category: Elder Scrolls
Genre: Alinor, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Knitting, Lillandril, Summerset Isles, they fuck you up your mum and dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 05:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10915545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarhiel/pseuds/tarhiel
Summary: A snapshot of Iriel's parents, involving knitting and regret.Background to my Morrowind fic,How to Disappear Completely, but probably not of interest to anyone beyond that!





	Passing the slipped stitch over

**Author's Note:**

> Set a couple of years before the start of HTDC, so no spoilers for anything.
> 
> Contains a few lyrical callbacks to the fact I started writing it after realising [this Magnetic Fields song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oodKrSy0zMo) made me think of Ire’s pa.

_Knit three, slip two, pass the slip stitch over._  
  
In a tiny fisherman’s cottage on the Lillandril docks, Murecano, done with his boat for the day, sat in his corner, bent over his knitting like a broken mast.  
  
The comparison was apt for reasons beyond posture: he was tall and thin even by Altmeri standards, mahogany hair plastered to his head by wind and salt-spray. Skeins of wool were piled next to him in coils of burnt orange, cloudy grey and moss green. His long wooden needles clicked softly, and he chanted the stitch pattern in his mind like a mantra. _  
  
Slip last stitch back to left needle. Turn work. Cast on two by cable method._  
  
The front door scraped, and Cinteril swept into the room. He didn’t look up, but he knew from the rhythm of his wife’s steps that she was furious. Stormed out of the meetinghouse in a huff again, he guessed. He hadn’t expected her home for another hour, by which time he had planned to be in the tavern. His fingers tightened on the needles.  
  
 _Turn work. Slip one, pass the slip stitch over._  
  
“Fuck them.” She threw her wrap onto the table, followed by her leather binder. Pages of densely hand-written notepaper spilled out of it onto the floor, and she stared at them. “Fuck them _all_ ,” she said, emphatically.  
  
Collecting up her papers, she threw them, one by one, into the wastebasket. “I won’t need _these_ any more. I didn’t even get to give my speech, in the end. Dilaadre told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was wasting my time. That I was being too radical, pushing for too much, too fast. The usual story. I left while they were still debating whether to propose a relaxation on Ouster facial thaumabrands. Limiting them to a maximum of two inches, and one per person!” She rolled her eyes, still pacing the room. “Revolutionary. Such a difference to their lives. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”  
  
 _Move working yarn to wrong side, slip next stitch, move yarn back._  
  
He saw her small, slippered feet stop in front of him, and forced himself to look up at her, before she told him to. His eyes tracked up the jade green cotton dress, across the broad expanse of her hips and belly, and over the curve of her bosom, adorned with a gold tayflower pin. The white lace kerchief at her throat was next, and then her heart-shaped face, with its brilliant green eyes. Her brown hair curled softly at the ends, tumbling out from under her fisherwife’s cap.  
  
He knew, in a detached kind of way, that she was very beautiful. Her skin was still smooth and ageless at eighty-three. Or was it eighty-two? He ought to know, as she was almost exactly sixteen years older then him, but to be honest, he hadn’t paid attention to that sort of thing in a long time.  
  
“Do you know why I left, in the end?”  
  
He blinked at her, wondering why she asked questions like that.  
  
“They told me I was biased, because my son was an Ouster. Insufficiently impartial! The nerve! For one thing, he is _not_ an Ouster. He is studying abroad, he is _not_ exiled, and he is most certainly not casteless. But more importantly, why the fuck _shouldn’t_ people related to Ousters have a say in whether or not the status is abolished! They should have more say than anyone besides the Ousters themselves! Honestly. These people have no understanding at all. Moreover, I was personally offended by the suggestion that my proposal was motivated by family self-interest. People can say whatever they like about me, but I have never, ever, acted for anything other than the good of my nation and its people. Never.”  
  
 _Come now, Cin. No one who knew you would ever suggest that you’d lift a finger to help our Iriel_.  
  
He said it inside his head. Everyone thought that Murecano was quiet, but he had more to say than people thought. He didn’t let most of it reach his lips, was all. He’d been the sole audience for his life’s narrative for nigh on forty years. Since he married Cinteril, in fact.  
  
Everyone had said it would never work. That it was doomed from the outset: a love match between a young fisherman, and the daughter of a minor Lillandril noble family. Forbidden by caste-law and parental disapproval, the combination of which was a marital veto in Summerset.  
  
Until documents had suddenly come to light, proving Murecano the lost scion of a noble bloodline long thought extinct. Not enough to convince the blood-courts to change his caste, but enough, perhaps, to convince Cinteril’s father. Or, as the more cynical would have it, (who, perhaps, knew of Cinteril’s dangerous combination of arrogance, determination and expert calligraphic forgery) enough to fool him.  
  
Murecano suspected even less: that Cin’s parents had seen the ruse for what it was: the last-ditch attempt of a woman in love to avoid eloping to Valenwood and never seeing her homeland again. That her parents, faced with losing their daughter either way, had chosen to be fooled; taken the opportunity to approve the marriage and save a degree of face. A basely-matched daughter was less shameful than a runaway one, even if the level of contact they now had was much the same.  
  
 _Bind off two more stitches. Slip remaining stitch from right to left needle._  
  
From across the room came the sound of pins scattering, as she pulled off her cap. She hated that cap, marking her as a fisherwife, barely even merchant caste. Not that she ever touched a fish, outside the kitchen. He dealt with all that, letting her focus on her passions: running a literacy class for local children too lowblooded for school, her small garden, and her tireless social activism.  
  
Mure sometimes wondered if they’d have been happier in Valenwood. He liked trees. Cinteril did too, although she preferred hers small and ornamental, in ceramic pots. Still, his passion for the outdoors was why she’d fallen in love with him in the first place. He only felt alive when he was out of the city, in contact with the real world of sea and sky. He’d taken her out in his boat, kissed her against the mast, as her hair streamed like a flag in the wind, screamed with the seagulls when she’d said yes. On land, in buildings, he felt the way jellyfish look, when you find them on the beach: flat, lifeless, all their buoyant joy deflated. His hours passed in a silent fugue, waiting for the tide.  
  
“Everyone” had been right: it hadn’t worked. A few years of steadily waning passion, and the wind had gone out of their sails completely, leaving them adrift, but still tethered. Cinteril’s pride was an immovable rock, however: they had chosen this, and they were going to maintain the façade. Prove that inter-caste marriages could work, and that caste-laws were sucking the vitality from Altmeri bloodlines.  
  
Murecano was stoical about it. He saw no point being otherwise. They fell into a pattern of living separate lives in the same space: he rising early to catch the tide, she sleeping late. He staying at the docks until dusk, selling his wares while she taught. He sleeping alone as she pored over her books deep into the night, writing diatribes and manifestos, often falling into bed just as he rolled out of it: ships passing in the night.  
  
After nearly twenty years of this, Iriel came as a complete surprise. Neither of them quite knew how it had happened. Probably the night of Cinteril’s sixtieth birthday, with the two bottles of skypeach wine. There was no doubt he was Mure’s, though, with those amber eyes, and that expression that defaulted to ‘haunted’. When he was born, Murecano had gazed at his son, filled with more joy than he’d known his heart had room for. For once in his life, he had, he felt, somehow done everything right. Cinteril, exhaustion rendering her practically serene, by her standards, had laughed, and told him he cried more than the baby did.  
  
 _Knit all the way to the end of the row. Purl the next, then another knit row._  
  
“Do you know who I saw, on my way through town?”  
  
 _She’s doing it again, by Phynaster._  
  
“Paelia, in the most hideous gown. Firionwe was with her, she must be up to visit. They both ignored me completely. Completely and totally, and I know they saw me.”  
  
Her footsteps moved back and forth, irregular and fretful. “It’s so hurtful! So _humiliating_ , that they would hold me responsible for what happened, when I did all I could to prevent it! The blame was completely his, and now he’s gone, left it all behind, but I’m still here, still paying for it. I can’t fucking stand it, Mure. She was the only true friend I had left, the only one who’d stuck with me.”  
  
The thing about knitting for others, thought Mure, was that it concentrated the mind on the person you were knitting for, and your feelings about them. In those moments of rage and despair when you were staring at an error you’d made ten, twenty rows ago, debating whether to let it stand or to unravel the work and do it again, you found yourself deeply interrogating how much you cared. How perfect your offering needed to be, how many of your mistakes you wanted them to carry around, reminding them of you. Whether they’d even notice. It was why he didn’t knit for Cinteril any more.  
  
“What are you making?”  
  
There was suspicion in her voice. He waited a moment, to see if she’d move on, but when the silence only intensified, he said, “A cardigan.”  
  
“Who for?”  
  
He shrugged, continued flicking the stitches from needle to needle, as she pulled a completed sleeve-piece from the floor and extended it against her arm. “It’s too narrow for you, and too long for me.”  
  
He shrugged again, eyes on his work.  
  
“It’s for _him_ , isn’t it? And don’t you dare shrug at me again, Mure.”  
  
He forced his shoulders still, willed himself to say, “Aye.”  
  
She fell silent a moment. Then, genuinely mystified: “But why?”  
  
He took a deep breath. “Saw a picture of the Imperial City once. Had snow on’t.”  
  
“You’re worried he’ll be _cold?_ ” She made a delicately incredulous sound in her throat. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for concerns like that?”  
  
“Aye.”  
  
If the boy was foulblood, Murecano knew, that was his doing. Cin’s bloodline was impeccable, after all. His was a pretty lie on paper, and a dull poison in his veins, proving Cin’s parents right with every beat of his heart.  
  
For all his joy at Iriel’s birth, he knew he’d never been much of a father. None of his attempts at connecting with his strange, awkward son had succeeded, the boy sitting somehow crooked in the world like a wrong puzzle piece. Always at a different angle to Mure, same sides never quite touching.  
  
Murecano understood not fitting in with people. He’d tried to share his sanctuaries: the sea, the shore, the deep forests, the places where nature demanded no words from you. But they hadn’t worked the same way for the boy, who’d found his escape routes only through books, and Mure couldn’t follow him there.  
  
“What are you going to do, send it to Cyrodiil?” She started laughing, reedy and mirthless. “He’s been disgraced, Mure. He may not have been Ousted, officially speaking, but they certainly sent him as far away as they could, didn’t they? And why was that?”  
  
He risked another shrug, knowing she didn’t need him to answer the question.   
  
“Because he’s foulblood through and through, that much is clear, now! He got everything he wanted, everything I worked his whole life towards, but even that wasn’t enough to stop… whatever it is in his blood that makes him keep doing these things. The Crystal Tower, the greatest minds of our land! They knew he wasn’t worthy, so what makes you think you know any better? Why are you rewarding him, why now? When he’s already thrown himself away? For fuck’s sake, Mure. Open your eyes.”  
  
 _Cast off all stitches. Break yarn._   
  
He’d been so relieved, the day he’d realised he didn’t have to love her any more, if he didn’t want to. All he had to do was his job: to go out in the boat every day, and catch enough to keep her fed and warm. After that, it had become so much simpler. He was keeping his promises to her through his actions. He’d never been any good with words.  
  
He dropped the finished front-piece into the pile on the floor, and took up the broken end of the wool again. Began casting on new stitches, one after another, eyebrows pressed together, fingers slow but steady.  
  
“He won’t wear this,” Cin was still holding the sleeve piece, twisting it in her fingers. “This wool’s too scratchy, he always had sensitive skin. He prefers pullovers to cardigans, he can’t abide buttons. And he hates orange. You’re the only one who ever liked orange around here. You should have asked me, I’d have told you before you wasted all this time.”  
  
He didn’t reply, and after a moment, she threw the sleeve at his feet. “It’s all very well for you to sit there and blame me, try to make me feel guilty, but what did you ever do? You weren’t here. You don’t even know him.”  
  
“Aye.”  
  
He heard the sharp expulsion of her breath, then she vanished into their bedroom, and closed the door. Ordinarily, he’d go to the tavern rather than listen to her cry, but he was feeling recalcitrant, and wanted to finish the ribbed section of the final cardigan piece before he lost count of the rows. There might even be enough left over for a hat, at this rate.  
  
 _Knit one, purl one, repeat until end._  
  
He thought about following her into the bedroom, and stroking her hair. He thought about walking out of the door and never coming back. But he’d checked the astrological report pinned to the Observatory board that morning, as he always did. It had warned him against making life-altering decisions today; the Serpent was threatening the Atronach, and Secundus was in retrograde. Cin’s horoscope had been even worse, but he wouldn’t dream of bothering her about such things.  
  
He was almost done, when he noticed the mistake. He’d miscounted somewhere, rows and rows back, and the ribs were out of step. Compared to the other side, it would be obvious. He hissed air through his teeth, and began to unpick it. Then he stopped. After a while, he began to knit again, imbuing each stitch with his own imperfection. Letting it, for once, be clearly visible, after all the years he had spent trying to hide it. Hiding behind his child’s imperfections, afraid to stand between him and Cinteril, lest she look at _him_ too hard instead, call out the foulbloodedness in him, finally admit she regretted her choice.  
  
 _None of us is as we should be_ , he thought. _Not you, not me, and not her neither. You already carry around my mistakes, whether you want ‘em or nay. At least when I’m stitchin’ 'em, you can choose to bear 'em or not. And p'raps even know that I can bear yours._  
  
He knew it was a lot for a piece of knitwear to convey, but it couldn’t do any worse than he had done, and he’d had two decades to try. To the rhythm of his wife’s muffled sobs, Mure tried to communicate things he didn’t have words for via small scratchy loops of burnt-orange wool.


End file.
